Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Feature Writing

Subject Description For Feature Writing
The Influence and Art of Documentaries:
 The objective of my research is to prove the powerful influence of documentaries as well as documentaries evolution into an important art form of modern society. Proving that personal eyewitness of a subject matter through documentaries has a stronger impact on societies ethos, logos, and pathos in regards to life changing issues. First, it is important to describe the history surrounding film and how documentaries bridge the cultural gap amongst people. Then through my personal experience of creating my own documentary, I will explain that an affective documentary informs without being biased allowing the audience to choose their own opinion of the subject presented. This Feature writing will target both males and females as I will use examples of different documentaries that have assisted in shaping the modern culture. Examining both documentaries and features stories will show the relationship that each of the forms of mass media need; through a well written feature story people might want to watch a documentary. For example this article written in on NaturalNews.com eloquently describes the documentary Let Them Eat Grasswill, 
(NaturalNews) There is a war being waged against real food - no, not the heavily-processed, chemical-laden garbage that fills the aisles of most major supermarkets today, but actual wholesome food grown on clean, family-scale farms across the U.S. And the upcoming documentary Let Them Eat Grasswill expose the aggressors in this widespread fight, as well as urge people like us to fight back and defend our constitutional right to choose healthy food. The film focuses on Wisconsin dairy farm Vernon Hershberger, who recently went to trial for the non-crime of providing healthy, unprocessed food to members of his private buying club. The Wisconsin State government went after Vernon, claiming he was in violation of state laws prohibiting the retail sale of food without a proper license, and tried to lock him up in prison for three years and bilk him for thousands of dollars in fines. But Vernon bravely stood his ground and fought back, and ultimately succeeded in stopping his state's bureaucratic gestapo from trampling he and his family's rights.
The author of this feature story does an excellent job at connecting the subject matter, which is the documentary, to the importance of the grassroots movement. My goal in this class is to evaluate and connect both documentaries and feature stories.
http://www.naturalnews.com/040623_Morninglane_Dairy_Vernon_Hershberger_food_freedom.html#ixzz2lWeQZYNN

1 comment:

  1. If you mean to do this as a "feature writing" project, you ought to focus on a more descriptive approach instead of having an objective of proving this or that -- that would make your writing like opinions or commentaries.

    With a feature writing approach, you will be using beautiful words to describe the documentary's characters, theme, filming techniques, etc. without interjecting your outright comments on the documentary. This provides a valuable service to the readers who may not have the time do view all the documentaries and those who rather use your features of various documentaries as a guide to help them select a limited number of films they do have time to watch.

    Sure, readers can still sense your approval or disapproval of a given documentary just from the descriptive words you have used, even without any outright comments in your writing. That's inevitable and you do not need to worry so much about this type of "bias." It's probably true that as a feature writer on documentaries, you are more likely to write about a film if it's really good and you enjoy doing it, and you are more likely to pass a film if it's mediocre as you lack the drive to write about it. As a result, most of your features probably encourage readers to watch the original documentaries.

    In short, what's important for you to remember for this project is that your features should not be commentaries.

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